Back to General and Gameplay Programming

"Full Spectrum Warrior" using fake HDR lighting technique? (screens inside)

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by FoxHunter2 September 18, 2004 01:00 PM

7 comments, last by FoxHunter2 19 years, 7 months ago

FoxHunter2

157

Author

September 18, 2004 01:00 PM

Hi! I just played the "Full Spectrum Warrior" PC demo and saw a kind of lighting I've never seen before in any other game. I think many of you know about the true HDR lighting which can be accomplished using Pixel and Vertex-shaders 2.0, as seen in tech demos, the DirectX SDK samples or Half-Life2. But I'm wondering, what this might be:

I own a GeForce4 which only supports vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.3. So what's "Full Spectrum Warrior" doing to accomplish this kind of lighting? It even runs great at high detail :) thanks in advance [Edited by - FoxHunter2 on September 18, 2004 2:52:54 PM]

JohnBolton

1,373

September 18, 2004 03:56 PM

I don't see any evidence of HDR from your screenshots. The bright sky bleeding into other parts of the picture is not done using HDR. (If you look closely you will also see the building bleeding into the sky.)

John BoltonLocomotive Games (THQ)Current Project: Destroy All Humans (Wii). IN STORES NOW!

Cipher3D

340

September 18, 2004 04:01 PM

Yeah...but he's saying how can they fake it that well...

I eat heart attacks

psamty10

148

September 18, 2004 05:01 PM

Full Spectrum Warrior was co-developed by USC-ICT(Institute for Creative Technologies), which was also where the first innovations in HDR were made. I doubt they'd be faking their own flagship technology.

izzo

439

September 18, 2004 09:17 PM

They might be using that fake HDR render-to-texture trick. Render just the sky to a texture and then draw it as a quad over the entire screen a number of times. Each time you make it a little bigger, and you get a bit more blurring going on. I think that's the general idea; there was a nehe tutorial on it iirc.

cheers
sam

digitec devil

206

September 18, 2004 09:26 PM

The blurring methods used to add glow, etc. in HDR rendering aren't all there is to it. You can still fake bright light sources with blurring and such, which is all I see there.

Aldenar

378

September 18, 2004 09:48 PM

I've seen slides of a GDC presentation that explained a way of doing that kind of "Glow" effect, it was called "Special Effects with DirectX 9" by Alex Vlachos and Greg James. I don't have any link, but it should be available on ATI or NVIDIA's websites. [Nothing DX9 specific in that effect, DX8 is fine for that].

_DarkWIng_

602

September 19, 2004 02:36 AM

This one is very simple. Render scene to texture with some kind of "light intensity" textues or use normal scene and do something like "color - treshold". The blur(using iterative donwsampling and summation) the texture and render it over scene using addive blending. All this can be done even on GF1 fully in HW. The problem is that it burns quite a bit of fillrate.

You should never let your fears become the boundaries of your dreams.

FoxHunter2

157

Author

September 19, 2004 05:21 AM

great, thanks for all your explanations!

"Full Spectrum Warrior" using fake HDR lighting technique? (screens inside)

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

"Full Spectrum Warrior" using fake HDR lighting technique? (screens inside)

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines